


Taxes, Toes & Tolerance

by mad_martha



Series: Auror [14]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-21
Updated: 2011-08-21
Packaged: 2017-10-22 22:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_martha/pseuds/mad_martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry has a taxing problem or two.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taxes, Toes & Tolerance

**Author's Note:**

> You can tell what was on my mind when I started writing this one. No, really, I _love_ the Inland Revenue and their darling little forms.

Sunlight streaming through a long window across a table scattered with books, parchment and quills .... Dust motes swirling in the air .... A low mumbling accompanied by quills scratching .... It was a lot like being back in the library at Hogwarts.

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose and stared blankly at the form in front of him. It bore the logo of the Inland Revenue and that was about the only part his brain could make any sense of. As if the self-duplicating forms from the Ministry of Magic's Taxation Office hadn't been bad enough a year ago, Harry was suddenly and inexplicably being harassed by their Muggle counterparts. He had no idea how, let alone why. As far as he knew he'd been out of their systems since he was eleven years old, and yet two mornings ago Dean Thomas had found _this_ on the mat in front of their never-used front door.

It was ironic, really. Dean and Hermione had both received Muggle tax forms the previous year when they'd started work. This was normal for Muggleborn witches and wizards and there was an office at the Ministry that dealt specifically with this particular issue. Harry, however, had left his Muggle relatives' guardianship well before his majority and _should_ have been treated the same way as any other half-blood wizard who was raised in a magical household. He shouldn't have appeared on the Muggles' radar at all after all this time.

Hermione - before dashing off to a week-long training session at the Aurors' forensic facility - had briskly advised him to take it to the office at the Ministry and get them to deal with it. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a different sort of tax form, one that they didn't normally deal with, and their only advice to Harry had been to fill it in to the best of his ability and return it.

The problem with that was that Harry didn't have a clue how to fill it in.

It had the student house address on it! Harry _knew_ that his aunt and uncle didn't know where he lived anymore, so how had the Inland Revenue of all people found out? Why did they have his name and details in the first place? And that was the least of his problems. They wanted to know his marital status (okay, he could manage that one), his National Insurance Number, his gross annual income, what savings he had and where, how much interest he accrued on it, whether he possessed any shares and if he did, whether he'd paid any tax on the dividends. There was a section devoted to the declaration of a number of benefits that he might or (more likely) might not be eligible for and how much he might think he was receiving from them. The paragraphs that followed were about his parents, their incomes and assets at the time of their deaths and questions about the tax they had paid prior to that.

The form had started with the words "I regret having to contact you at a time of bereavement ....". His parents had died _eighteen years_ ago. His father hadn't been a Muggle anyway, so why were they asking questions about him?

And even had Harry known how to answer many of these questions, there was still the issue of converting Galleons into Sterling. The conversion rates between Muggle and Magical money fluctuated by the hour and were a mystery only fully understood by the goblins of Gringotts. Harry wondered if it was worth a trip to Gringotts, although previous experience of the goblins didn't make him hopeful. Or perhaps he could persuade Seamus to help him out somehow. One thing was certain; he couldn't go to the nearest Muggle tax office and ask for help. Aside from everything else, that would confirm his existence beyond doubt and then he would never get rid of them.

Perhaps he could just mark the envelope "not known here" and return it. A couple of simple charms would repair the torn envelope and remove the tea stain from the first page. The trouble with that was this house had been leased from a Muggle rental agency and his name was on the paperwork as one of the lessees. Harry's knowledge of how the Inland Revenue worked was purely anecdotal, but he didn't think they would find it a big stretch of their ingenuity to question the landlord.

How _had_ they found him in the first place?

 _... scratch mutter mumble scratch mumble rustle scratch ...._

Harry slowly focussed on the noise and then its source, and a tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Ron's red hair was a blaze of colour in the sunlight as he worked at the opposite side of the study table. One hand rested on the open pages of an Auror manual, while the other wrote laboriously on a trailing length of parchment. The inkblots and scratchings-out were visible even from where Harry was sitting and he hoped for his friend's sake that this was just a rough draft. Ron was talking to himself as usual, a habit that had driven Hermione mad at school, the barely audible phrases he quoted from the manual interspersed with swear words and grumbling.

A substantial part of their training as Aurors focussed on the legalities of what they did, and hand in hand with that went essential training in how to handle the inevitable paperwork and write coherent reports. This was what he and Ron were supposed to be doing now. They had been given several mock 'cases' to work with and their assignment was to produce full sets of paperwork, including Case Auror reports, for each one. Incredible as it seemed to Harry, sixty percent of their marks on this assignment would come from correct completion of the paperwork alone; only forty percent relied on the deductions they made from the information provided. This, according to Sirius, was because several important Death Eater trials had collapsed during the previous war due to sloppy paperwork.

Harry looked discontentedly at his own barely-started report draft and then back at the tax form. The whole bloody world was an immense, self-serving bureaucracy so far as he could see. There would be no assistance for them from Hermione either. Someone had long ago ratted on Harry and Ron to their instructors at the Facility, with the result that Hermione was being trained on a different schedule, doing the same things as them but at different times. Harry had his suspicions about who the informer was, too. Had it been Sirius he might have tried to get his revenge on his godfather - in a humorous way that he knew Sirius would appreciate - but Remus was an entirely different matter.

Oh well. If he could just think of a way to deal with this tax form, then he might be able to concentrate a little better ....

Someone's foot was sliding up his leg. He could feel five nimble toes clad in a woolly sock even through the denim of his jeans and the sensation sent a shiver all the way up his spine.

"Stop it," Harry murmured, trying unsuccessfully to suppress a grin.

"Hm?" Ron never even raised his head, but Harry could hear the mischief in that wordless response.

"Remember the rules!"

"No one's around," Ron murmured back.

 _...scratch scratch rustle scratch ...._

Harry felt the toes inch higher; not that it was much of a stretch for someone with legs as long as Ron's. How on earth did he concentrate on his report while he was doing that?

"Ron ...."

"If you don't stop fussing about that stupid Muggle form, I'm going to have to ...." Ron trailed off suggestively. Then he gave lie to the words by flipping his parchment over and starting a new paragraph. He hadn't looked up once.

Harry slouched in his seat a little and the toes climbed to his inner thigh. It was pleasantly distracting.

"If I don't do something about the form, they might send someone to the house to look for me," he said.

"The anti-Muggle charms'll see 'em off."

The toes wriggled a bit further up the inside of Harry's leg, pausing tantalisingly close to his crotch. It occurred to Harry that he really shouldn't be encouraging Ron in this. They were alone in the study, yes; but Dean and Ginny were both elsewhere in the house. They could walk in at any moment, and he didn't feel like getting stuck with the grocery shopping again just because they'd been caught fooling around by one of their more sensitive housemates. Besides, Ginny had recently shown an unnerving degree of interest in the more personal aspects of their relationship. Harry didn't want to encourage her burgeoning voyeurism.

"I don't think Muggle tax men are that easily put off," he said vaguely, slouching a little more. Just an inch or two higher ....

"They're like a lot of your other fans," Ron commented, scratching out another messy sentence. "They only want you for your money."

The toes brushed enjoyably up the seam of Harry's jeans and Harry pounced, grabbing Ron's ankle and ripping the sock off. That got his friend's attention.

"What - oy - no!"

Harry pause, fingers barely touching the arch of Ron's bare foot. "Stop teasing me, or I tickle!"

"Cheek!" Ron protested hotly. "You sat there and encouraged me to do it!"

"Did not!"

"Did so!"

"Okay, maybe I did," Harry conceded. "Maybe I was trying to get your attention."

"You've got it, you don't have to tickle!" Ron protested as Harry's fingers brushed up the arch of his foot.

Harry grinned and tweaked his big toe instead. "Relax! Don't you trust me?"

"Harry, you're holding my foot," Ron said, gripping the arms of his chair to stop himself sliding off the seat.

"Yeah, I know. Good thing you had a bath this morning." Harry tweaked the toe again. "No offence, mate, but your feet are huge."

"I'd look pretty stupid with feet the size of Ginny's, wouldn't I?" Ron raised a brow at him. "Besides, the size of your feet directly relates to the size of your - "

"Stop bragging!" Harry told him, amused. "I've seen it, remember?"

"- IQ," Ron finished blandly, and he grinned at Harry's expression. "Now can you stop twisting that toe so hard? It's okay to fondle it a bit, if you like - yeah, like that. Now the others ...."

"Kinky sod!"

"My feet are one of my erogenous zones," Ron explained.

 _"Erogenous zones!"_ Harry let out a hoot of laughter. "Listen to the Dictionary Man!"

The door opened and he hastily dropped Ron's foot. Ginny put her head around the door.

"What on earth are you two doing?" she wanted to know.

"Nothing you'd understand," Ron said in an obnoxious tone. "Run along, why don't you?"

"You weren't holding his foot, were you?" Ginny demanded of Harry, wrinkling her nose. "That's revolting!"

"He says it's one of his erogenous zones," Harry explained, although he could feel his ears turning hot.

She snorted. "Don't be silly, Ronald - you have to have nerve-endings to have an erogenous zone!"

"Like _you'd_ even know the difference between an erogenous zone and a baggy bra strap!" he scoffed.

"If my bras are baggy, it's probably because you've been trying my clothes on again," she retorted in a bored voice.

 _"Again?"_ Harry said, startled.

"The twins made me wear one of her dresses once, when we were little," Ron explained, annoyed. "She's never let me forget it."

"They obviously knew something about you that the rest of us didn't, even then," Ginny said, smirking.

"Because being gay automatically makes me a cross-dresser, I suppose. Don't be so bloody pig-ignorant, Ginny."

"If the bra fits, Ronald!"

"It's probably nearer my size, don't you think?" Harry said quietly, with one eye on Ron's face. He didn't like the way the humour had suddenly disappeared from his friend's eyes, but Ginny didn't seem to have noticed.

She made a rude noise, not taking the hint. "I don't see you in a mini-skirt somehow, Harry."

"No, of course not." Harry gave Ron a warning jab with his foot when it looked like he would interrupt. "That's my point." Ginny gave him a startled look. "Let it drop," he advised her.

She looked put out, and hitched one shoulder up defiantly as she backed out of the room and slammed the door.

"Let it go," Harry told Ron in the same mild tone. Ron's face was like the proverbial thundercloud. "She didn't mean it that way, you know that. She was just trying to get your goat."

"She got it," Ron snapped.

"You shouldn't let her get to you like that. If you can put up with the twins - "

"It's not that," Ron interrupted him. For a moment he looked angry and frustrated, then he sighed and sagged back into his chair. "I get a bit fed up with the comments, you know? Not just from Gin - from Seamus and Dean and even Neville sometimes. No one makes smart remarks like that about Seamus and his birds, or goes on at Nev about him being a closet transvestite."

Harry pursed his lips, thinking about this. "I don't know," he said reluctantly. "I think they do make smart remarks sometimes - maybe it's just less noticeable with the others because we've _always_ made smart remarks about them. It's like background noise."

"Oh, come off it, Harry!"

"No, I'm serious! Okay, it's a bit pointed when Ginny says it because you and Ginny have always bickered, haven't you? She'll say anything she thinks'll get under your skin. I really don't think it's anything more than that, Ron."

"You're always so ready to think the best of people," Ron told him impatiently. "You'll do anything to avoid admitting that most people are a bunch of bigoted gits."

"That's a bit strong," Harry said, hurt. "It's not that I don't notice, it's just that I don't see what good it does to get worked up about it. If most people knew about us and it was directed at us personally, then yes, I'd have a problem and I'd challenge them. But they don't, Ron, so what's the point? There's not a lot we can say without raising a lot of questions neither of us want to deal with."

"So it doesn't bother you when we walk into a room and Seamus says _Hello, girls!_?" Ron demanded.

Harry sighed. "Ron, the last time he did that I pinched his arse and called him Fifi, and he promised never to say it again. And if you could just bring yourself to do it back to them too, they'd stop it. Well, maybe not Neville but I think he gets a kick out of being called Norah. When did he get so kinky, do you reckon?"

Ron ignored this. "Are you really trying to tell me that it doesn't bother you that Sirius might blow a blood vessel if he ever finds out about you being gay? Or Remus?"

"No ... I'm not saying that." Harry fell silent.

Of course it bothered him. Worry over what Sirius would think - how he might react - had been preying on Harry's mind for more than a year now. His relationship with his godfather was a complex one, part parent-child and part something else that Harry couldn't identify and thought might be unique to them. The thought of it being disrupted by his relationship with Ron was deeply upsetting, because Harry didn't know how he would cope if the two became mutually exclusive. He couldn't bear to be at odds with Sirius to that degree. But equally he didn't think he could bear to give up his relationship with Ron.

As for Remus - well, Harry didn't suppose things would reach anything like that extreme with Remus because Remus was not a man of larger-than-life emotions and reactions like Sirius. But on the other hand, he _was_ someone Harry respected and held in deep affection and he hated to disappoint the man in any way.

He hated to think that either of them would react negatively to the news that he was to all intents and purposes gay, but he didn't _know_ and he lived in fear of that reaction as much as he lived in fear of the open contempt of a great many people in his life. He loved Ron without question and wouldn't let those fears come between them, but that didn't mean he had to like the situation.

And yes, it _was_ uncomfortable that their nearest friends, the only people who knew about them, could treat the situation so lightly and unconcernedly, and not realise that their jokes were hurtful. But Harry couldn't see a way of dealing with that without making life even more uncomfortable for them all.

"Look," he said finally, "I understand what you're saying - really. But if you keep battering at people about it and getting a chip on your shoulder every time one of them makes a dodgy remark, _you're_ going to be angry all the time and _they're_ going to get pissed off and resentful about it. For what it's worth, I don't think any of them are really homophobic, Ron - not even Seamus, even if he is a bigger dickhead about it than the rest. They're just … uncomfortable with it sometimes."

He saw the unreceptive look on Ron's face and tried again. "I reckon for most of them it's something new to think about, you know? It's like when they first found out we were sleeping together and Seamus kept banging on about how he didn't get it. You see these two mates of yours and you think you know them, and then they spring this thing on you unexpectedly and you realise that maybe you don't know them after all. That's difficult to deal with. Dean, Seamus and Neville shared a room with us for seven years. It's got to make them question things, like - were we always gay? Were we looking at them sometimes? Does the fact that they didn't notice we were gay say something about them? And sometimes, when you can't deal with those questions any other way, the easiest way to deal with it is to laugh. It could be worse, you know."

"Yeah," Ron muttered. "I know."

"They could have decided to deal with it by hexing us and telling us to get the hell out of the house," Harry continued. "It's not like we haven't seen bigotry like that, _real_ bigotry - think of what people do to werewolves sometimes. And I haven't forgotten the way my aunt and uncle treated me, without even telling me _why_ they hated me. I can live with a few remarks occasionally, because I know it doesn't mean anything. And at least I can call Seamus a stupid prat to his face when he says things and know that he won't lose it and punch me. It really _is_ just a joke."

Ron sighed, slouching in his chair and staring out of the window. "I know all that," he said. "I just … sometimes I just hate the secrecy and the reasons for it. That doesn't mean I'm ready to tell people, but I can still hate that it's something to be afraid of, can't I? And I hate that they don't get that. I hate that my sister of all people thinks it's a big joke when she knows damn well why I don't tell Mum and Dad and even agrees that I shouldn't."

"She doesn't mean it that way," Harry said. "Teasing is how you both deal with each other. If you had to stop doing that, the pair of you wouldn't have a clue how to talk to each other."

Ron snorted a laugh, not particularly humorously but his shoulders relaxed completely and the face he turned to Harry was calmer.

"Maybe - but if she cracks another joke about me being a transvestite, I'll strangle her with her own hair. That's just not even funny."

Harry pretended to look shocked. "Ron, are you bigoted about transvestites?"

"Bugger off," Ron told him, beginning to grin, and he gave Harry a friendly shove with his bare foot. "I don't give a damn what they wear, so long as no one tries to stick _me_ in a flippin' frock, okay? Once in a lifetime is enough for that!"

Harry grinned back at him, leaning back in his chair and stretching. "It's too hot to write. I'll do my essay tonight. So ... before we were so annoyingly interrupted, were you planning to do something with that foot?"

xXx 

Harry was drowsing against Ron's shoulder a couple of hours later when the form from the Inland Revenue fluttered into his dreams and woke him up with a twinge of alarm. He grimaced and peeled himself away from his partner - it was so hot in their attic room, even with the windows open, that they were literally sticking together - and picked up his wand to lower the privacy spell from the door. Assorted odd noises intruded from the rooms below and Ron turned over, grumbling sleepily.

Harry left him there and went to get a quick shower. When he emerged from the bathroom he could hear voices drifting up from the kitchen, the tones suggesting that some disaster had occurred. Ron was still asleep when he returned to their room, but he could sleep through anything when he chose; Harry dressed and left him to it.

When he arrived in the kitchen, Neville, Dean and Seamus were piling the contents of the refrigerator onto the kitchen counter and grumbling. There was a large pool of water on the tiled floor.

"What happened?" Harry asked.

"The chilling charms on the fridge collapsed," Seamus said, annoyed. "I knew we shouldn't have bought it from that shyster in the Alley!"

Actually, it had been Hermione who suggested it was risky buying a second-hand fridge from a back street dealer, but she had been outvoted by the majority. Harry wondered if they could fix or replace it before she got back from her course. She was not adverse to saying "I told you so" and generally in six different ways, each designed to make the recipient feel even more stupid.

"Has everything defrosted?"

"Pretty much." Dean dumped a soggy cardboard box on the counter and wiped his hands on the seat of his jeans. "Looks like we're having battered cod with hash browns, broad beans and rhubarb ice-cream for dinner tonight."

"Rhubarb milkshake," Neville corrected him wryly, and he put the container onto the counter; it made an ominous sloshing sound.

Harry reflected on how much he disliked both broad beans and rhubarb ice cream, and wondered who had bought them in the first place.

"Can't we just dump it all and order pizza for once?" he asked hopefully. "I'll pay."

"Today's great thought!" Seamus said enthusiastically.

"We still need to sort the fridge out though," Neville pointed out.

"Let's just get a new one," Harry said, eyeing the old second-hand one with disfavour. "We could probably fix the charms for now, but it's bound to fall over again at some point."

"How are we going to pay for it?" Dean asked, and there was a pause. Money was always a twitchy subject, mostly because Hermione had twin bees in her bonnet about efficient fiscal management and not sponging off Harry, but it was a fact that Harry was the only one of them with enough ready cash for large purchases like this.

Harry sighed and waved it off. "We need a new fridge more than we need an argument," he said firmly. "I'll pay for it for now, and we can sort it out at the next house meeting. I'd better wake Ron up and take him with me - I'm buggered if I know where to go in Diagon Alley to buy a new fridge. You three get rid of the old one." He dug into his pocket and pulled out a handful of loose change, dropping it onto the kitchen table. "Get the dinner on the way back, will you? Better get a load of onion rings, coleslaw and garlic bread while you're at it."

Finding and buying a new fridge took a while. Ron and Harry returned to the house nearly two hours later to find the others in the kitchen, throwing out the last bits of perishable food. Numerous fragrant boxes from the nearest pizza restaurant were piled on the dinner table and Neville was just putting Cooling Charms on a couple of bottles of milk on the kitchen counter.

"We got the fridge but it won't be delivered till tomorrow," Harry said.

"Thank you, ladies!" Seamus called from the pantry.

Harry gave Ron a warning look. "With a bit of luck, it'll arrive before Hermione gets home."

"She'll know it's a new fridge," Ginny said.

"But she doesn't have to know everything about what happened unless you tell her," he retorted tiredly. "Just tell her it died, okay? She doesn't need to know there was water and melted ice-cream everywhere."

"I don't know about that. I think she'd love to hear all about how that crummy fridge you boys insisted on buying went wrong - just as she predicted it would." Ginny gave him an impish little smirk, and Harry felt a moment of sympathy for Ron's earlier annoyance with his sister. He loved her, but sometimes she resembled the twins too much for comfort.

"In that case, why don't I just tell your mum?" he suggested. "Then we can have the lecture about buying shoddy equipment from her, how about that?" At least Hermione would only be superior about it. Mrs. Weasley would probably shout at them all.

Ginny took the point and shut up.

"Nice one," Ron murmured, grinning. "What've you got there, Nev?"

Neville was surveying a square china dish doubtfully. "It's the butter. D'you reckon if I stick a charm on it, it'll be okay for breakfast tomorrow? It got a bit ... melty."

Ron took the dish and tilted it from side to side, watching the near-liquid butter slowly pouring around the sides. A wicked smile crossed his face and he turned to Harry.

"Come here and let me rub melted butter all over your body!" he said in a seductive voice.

"Oy!" Seamus burst out of the pantry, bristling with indignation. "That's disgusting, Weasley!"

Ron gave him a look of wide-eyed innocence. "What?"

"What happened to rule number seven?"

"But I'm not touching him!"

Harry swallowed a laugh at Seamus's expression. "He's right, you know," he pointed out. "Rule seven only says "no groping". Innuendo is fair game - which is just as well really," he added, giving Neville's latest example of Herbologist t-shirt humour a pointed look.

To his mild surprise, Dean backed him up.

"Got to admit it, Nev, that t-shirt's the worst," he said, as he pulled plates and cutlery from cupboards and drawers.

Neville sniggered. "What?! There's nothing wrong with cucumbers!"

"On the plant or in a salad, maybe," Harry retorted. "But on a naked bloke?"

"Would have thought that was right up your alley," Seamus muttered.

"What's right up my alley?" Harry demanded, raising a brow. "Obviously you have a closer relationship with cucumbers than me, Fifi - tell us more!"

"No thanks," Ron said, giving Seamus a dangerous smile. "I hear enough about his kinks when he's having Floo-sex with one of his birds."

"I do not!"

"Yeah, you do," Dean said. "Gets a bit boring after a while."

Seamus ignored this. "Don't call me Fifi!" he said, pointing a finger at Harry.

"I'll do you a deal - I'll stop calling you Fifi, if you stop calling Ron and me "girls" and "ladies"," Harry returned.

" _Or_ fags, _or_ robe-lifters," Ron added.

"Or anything else like that," Harry finished for him.

"All right already!" Seamus looked sulky. "Some people have no sense of humour." He was heading for the dinner table when something else evidently occurred to him, for he stopped and glared back at them. "And no one had better pinch or slap my arse either!"

"Damn!" Ron said sarcastically. "Another lifelong ambition squashed!"

"Some people have no sense of humour," Neville added mournfully.

"Let's just eat," Ginny said warningly and they all made for the table rather hastily.

"Speaking of people with no sense of humour," Harry said, as they divided up the four giant pizzas Seamus and Dean had bought and passed around the coleslaw, dips and onion rings, "what the hell am I going to do about that form from the Inland Revenue? Anyone got any ideas?"

"Oh, for crying out loud! You and that bloody form," Ron said, amused and exasperated.

"It's all right for you! You won't have the blokes from the Inland Revenue after you."

"Neither will you, pillock! Even if they come here - and I bet they won't - what do you think they're going to do? We just obliviate them and off they toddle, none the wiser. Simple."

"And then spend the next three weeks filling out the Ministry paperwork to cover the unauthorised obliviation!" Harry retorted. "Yeah, great plan."

"If you're that worried about it, why don't you talk to Sirius or Professor Lupin?" Ginny suggested sensibly. Like most of them, she had never got out of the habit of referring to Lupin by his short-lived school honorific. "One of them is bound to know what to do - you can't be the only person to have ever got one of these forms!"

"Feels like it sometimes," Harry said dryly. "But that's a good idea. I'll nip over to Godric's Hollow after dinner."

"No you won't," Ron told him.

"Why not?"

"Well, apart from you needing to write your essay - "

"Bugger, I forgot that."

" - There's half a pint of melted butter with your name on it," Ron finished mischievously, and he ducked quickly to avoid the lumps of garlic bread hurled at him by the others.


End file.
